Techie :: Techno ::: May 2005 Archives

Over the last year the traffic and submissions to search.ie have grown exponentially. Unfortunately the number of spammers submitting rubbish has increased as well. The site was originally using Links 2 which uses a flatfile database with a perl frontend. Although it was very flexible in terms of templates etc., it did not scale very well, so I moved it to using a MySQL based backend about a year ago. The backend I chose seemed to do what I wanted, but it did not scale very well either. It suffered from a number of issues: - The guy who wrote it obviously didn't know too much about *nix systems - The MySQL queries were terrible - The page build process was slow and resource intensive - Link management was terrible - It did not scale I did look for alternatives, but a lot of the ones I came across were simply not suitable. In the end I got another license for Gossamer Links SQL (glinks) and am now porting the entire DB over to it. Importing all the existing links manually would have been a long and painful process, so I'm using a plugin from Ultranerds.com It still requires a lot of cleaning up after the initial import, but it's well worth it. With a bit of luck I'll be able to accept new submissions to search.ie after the weekend or at least at some stage next week.

Why the hell do AIB insist on conducting maintenance on Mondays? Their site has been pig slow all morning and the business banking section has been inaccessible. I'm getting really tired of this. I can't access it with anything except for IE on windows, which severely limits me. They've been promising to update the entire business banking thing to use a sane version of Java, but so far it hasn't happened. Gah! Not happy!

I've been working away on Browse.ie in my free time for the last few weeks and have added a couple of new features including a forum. The other thing I am working on is getting people to edit some of the categories. If anybody is interested in looking after a category they can request it in the forum. So far the only category that has an editor is "Dublin" :)

Exit0 have a modified version of Raymond's spam assassin ruleset that will catch the bounces: German spam

A very handy little plugin: here It displays some essential stats from your adsense account in the status bar of firefox.

There's a new wave of political spam hitting mailservers across Europe and presumably the globe. Most of it seems to be in German, though some subject lines in English have been reported. It looks like they are being sent by zombie PCs. This is very similar to the nazi spam which was spotted about 14 months ago. Update: Raymond has released an SA ruleset to block most of this junk which has been identified as being sober related You can grab the ruleset from : http://mailscanner.prolocation.net/german.cf I've added that to some of our servers and it's working nicely

If you are upgrading from an older install be very careful with the spam.assassin.prefs.conf, as the latest version that ships with MS has a number of changes in it that can cause issues with your Bayes' settings ie. location of the files With older installs you may have place the files in: /var/spool/spamassassin you would have set the path to bayes to be: /var/spool/spamassassin/bayes The new default settings in the file work on a slightly different basis, so you should check carefully before implementing them.

A few months ago I mentioned email disclaimers, more specifically the rather silly and amusing ones. Over the last few weeks some people's usage of disclaimers AND signatures has been getting on my nerves. Do I really want to read 10 lines of links and spurious junk AND a long corporate disclaimer? An email signature should contain the necessary contact information ie. company name, website, telephone and fax. There's no point in putting in line upon line of text, "bouncy" signatures, graphics or other things. They may impress people who don't use email much, but if you get any serious levels of email this kind of crap is simply annoying.

I found it rather amusing that Weckler's editorial in this week's SBPost was about corporate blogs. Talk about "jumping on the bandwagon". You'd think that: - nobody had ever written about it - there was something really revolutionary Excuse my sarcasm, but I find the editorials rather bland and lacking in originality. I almost prefer his random rants.

I've spent quite a bit of the weekend tidying up things on browse.ie, such as page titles, the link submission page and a few other things. It still needs work, but it's pretty much open for business.

Chip and PIN is a revolutionary new payment system that introduces a more secure way for over 1.1 million Laser cardholders in Ireland. Why are we so far behind other countries? France had a "chip and pin" system at least 13 years ago, possibly longer, and yet both laser and the CC processors are hailing the introduction of the system as "revolutionary". I wouldn't care what they called the damned thing if I could actually use it where I wanted to. Shops don't seem to have any problem with it, but just try buying something online! So far this week I've had one government department's site reject my laser saying the number was invalid, while the WorldPay gateway for CDwow rejected it without any reason. I am not impressed!